Valve's Steam Controller Drops The Touchscreen, Adds Buttons

At its Steam Dev Days event, Valve announced that the Steam Controller no longer has a touchscreen.

The Steam Controller is Valve's "different kind of gamepad" to be used with the upcoming line of Steam Machines. When it was originally announced, the developer stated that the controller's touchscreen, "allows an infinite number of discrete actions to be made available to the player, without requiring an infinite number of physical buttons." According to reports from Endgadget and variousTwitterposts, it seems Valve has changed its mind, as now instead of a touchscreen, the Steam Controller will have a directional-pad (D-PAD) and a standard ABXY button configuration that can be remapped. Twitter user Leszek Godlewski posted a prototype of the button layout from the presentation.

The new Steam Controller?

These changes were made to help with backwards compatibility issues. Additionally, Valve thought that the touchscreen distracted folks from the games they were playing as they were constantly looking at their hands instead of their TVs. In the past, Valve has said it wanted the Steam Controller to be competitively priced with other controllers. This may have been another reason they ditched the screen.

Valve also revealed that the controller will have an API that's built in to Steam API for developers. This will help them integrate the Steam Controller into their games and it will support up to 16 Steam Controllers at once.